Rage and the Machine

The phenomenal James Blake-Tommy Haas match on Monday, which Haas won in a fifth-set tiebreaker, demonstrated the indispensability of Hawk-Eye, the system of high-speed cameras that enables players to challenge line calls. The Open adopted Hawk-Eye last year, as much to thrill the fans as to assuage the players or improve the refereeing. (The replay of the ball flying through virtual space is shown on TV and on a big screen at the stadium, so that the fans can serenade it, half-sarcastically, it seems, with a mounting “Whoooooooaaaa” as the ball aproaches the line.) The system gives off an aura of infallibility, with its apparent ability to discern whether the ball has caught a millimetre of line. It does have an average margin of error of 3.6 millimetres, or five per cent of the diameter of the ball, and many of the calls it confirms or overrules are that close, so it would seem to be fatally flawed. But, as the tennis writer Peter Bodo points out on his blog, its greatest virtue may be that it appears conclusive. As a final recourse, and as an inhuman and therefore presumably unbiased one—a determinant without agency—it has a way of coaxing players to accept calls that otherwise might drive them nuts. The last two calls of the Blake-Haas match were as close as close can be, and yet the players accepted the results with equanimity. Not that Blake wouldn’t have been a gentleman anyway. (Haas, on the other hand: at one point, after running down a drop shot and nearly ramming into the umpire’s chair, he rather hilariously, like a husband who has knocked a clock off a nightstand, berated the umpire: “Why’d you put the chair so close?”) In fact, the person who complains the most about Hawk-Eye may be Roger Federer, who has on occasion seemed to doubt its findings. At Wimbledon, a number of Hawk-Eye calls that went against him had him whining to the umpire—“It’s killing me”—during a changeover. It was perhaps his most graceless moment since he became No. 1, and a fair sign that his opponent (Rafael Nadal, who else) had him rattled. But maybe he was right and Hawk-Eye was wrong. Maybe his margin of error is less than 3.6 millimetres.

This brings up an interesting explanation for John McEnroe’s shenanigans, one that Mac himself might embrace: hawk-eyed, he saw the ball so well that bad calls seemed incomprehensible to him. But, then again, he also went bananas about good calls. Hawk-Eye would have driven him nuts.

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